by Robert Reed
He remembers the whore screaming.
Gabbro ignored her as he lifted Toby, carrying him out through the front room with one arm. Again the balcony creaked under the weight. Toby became airborne. He remembers the spinning sensation and the thought that he would die now, and the smooth warm hands of a miner had him. An eerie black face smiled, ceramic teeth stinking of cooked meat and beer, and a voice from somewhere inside the body said:
You’re shit.
Toby struggled, and the miners had a laugh.
Gabbro came down and laughed too, enjoying himself, and said, So You’re a swimmer? That’s what they do on Garden, right?
They dropped him into the pool, two other miners jumping in beside him and holding him under the surface. They massaged his ribs until the air was out of him and his head ached and he lacked the strength to kick to the surface when the hands let him go. He was sick. He saw darkness all around and felt himself floating, time compressed into a painless age where the floating seemed right and fine and all he could ever want to do. He was happy. Drowning made him happy. Then someone had him, pulling him upward, and he fought the pull because he didn’t want to lose this feeling. But he didn’t have strength and he was up out of the water, on his back on the soft-coral deck, and he rolled on his side and coughed hard and vomited. There was bile in his mouth and nose. He was sick and so sad, so weak, and he sobbed and rolled to his other side and looked through tears at all the miners standing and watching him and talking to a tall man who was watching him, too.
It was the one with scars and the red hair. Steward, someone called him.
He looked like a toy beside the miners, but he stood there and was furious, and fearless, and it seemed as though they were stung by whatever he said. He had them quiet now. He had them backing away. Toby can’t remember the words or even the tone of his voice, but then the miners retreated inside and the red-haired man was over him, mopping at his sour mouth with the sleeve of his own shirt. Toby was humiliated. He didn’t want help. Just let me lie here! he thought. Go!
The red-haired man finally helped him stand. He said something about them being good people. He said both sides were to blame and forget it. He asked if Toby was all right.
Yeah. Fine.
How do you feel? he asked.
I want to be alone.
Steward looked through him, his expression passive. Then he turned and left without saying another thing. Toby went home through the hallways, climbing the stairs slowly, and when he came into the front room he stood and listened for a long while, hearing the night sounds through the open door and thinking he’d have to get the door fixed. They weren’t scaring him away, he swore to himself. He wasn’t going to let it happen.
Then he remembered the whore.
She was gone. He went into the bedroom and found it empty, the closets open and clothes scattered and some of the hidden quiver chips missing. He thought about the police. He couldn’t see any good from them. He sat on the mattress, drained, and listened to the sounds from below. The party was quieter. He tried to imagine what was happening, picturing an orgy between Terrans and the miners, and he made them artless and ugly in his mind, without style or aim or spirit.
He hated all of them.
Sitting in the dark, he pondered his circumstances until he was deathly tired, eyes closing of their own volition, and he leaned against the wall and felt the vibrations from below, felt them rising up into his poor bones.
Now he’s in the front room. The air is stale and close and he wants the door open. Except there’s that bird, he thinks. He couldn’t stand a repeat of yesterday. He’s eating biscuits again, drinking cool water, and from time to time he glances at the empty yard, green and noisy and already hot. It’s early for him. Nerves have him on edge. He’ll study some more of the old propaganda, he decides, and cure his nerves that way. Or maybe something on the terraforming of Garden.
There’s nothing from below. Gabbro’s asleep or working.
No, he thinks, they’re not chasing me out of this place. I leave for my own reasons, damn them!
He stands, feeling defiant enough to open the glass door a crack, and a slight warm breeze plays across his bare toes. The red-haired man is up and eating, sitting in the middle of his old sofa. Toby feels an urge to have a word with him, one prisoner to another. He remembers his talking to the miners, fearing nothing. Then the man stands, and motion inspires motion. Toby starts to pick up dishes and stash them in his little washer. Working in the kitchen-corner, punching out commands to the AIs, he sniffs and smells something wrong. It’s tainted food welling up out of the grocery chute. Dear Prophet, he thinks, what’s the story? Am I poisoned now? Or what?
He feels the wind gusting outdoors.
He goes to the door and looks out, giving the pool an accusing stare. Maybe it’s fouled, he thinks. Maybe Gabbro’s to blame. Maybe the management will boot him out for doing it…only that doesn’t comfort him. He wants a different resolution. And his eyes drop and there’s the bird laying at his feet. The black feathers are dulled and ruffled, many of them broken. He sees blood and the dull dead eyes and a body twisted in some wrong fashion. Toby starts to kneel, then gags. He sees the way the bones are shattered, and he counts finger marks, each as big as fat sausages.
Gabbro crushed the bird.
He killed it and then tossed it up on the balcony.
Why?
As a warning? he asks himself. Another kind of tormenting?
He sees nothing but evil intended. On Garden, he thinks, rotting meat is not a disagreeable odor. Different bacteria produce different byproducts. He says, “All right,” without emotion. He kneels and picks up the bird by a dead curled foot, its toes like wires and its body light and inert, and he dumps it into the garbage chute and swears, “No more. No more.”
8
The Freestaters I have known are a diluted strain of the breed—odd southern cousins who lack that peculiar fire and discipline associated with the word Freestater. The ones I’ve known best are part of a little nation called Banff. It’s a rugged land, pretty and primitive, yet accessible to travelers like myself. Its people pride themselves on not being the fanatics of lore. They wage their wars only on certain days and weeks, for instance. They don’t inflict as much pain on their enemies, and naturally they don’t endure it as well either. Some have World-Net connections in their homes. Others have traveled beyond their borders. Yet they are Freestaters, still and for always. They are taught to fight from an early age. They do not kill. (So strong is that taboo that merely asking about the incidence of murder in Banff—a harmless, almost expected question in Singapore or Jarvis or Quito—brings out a look of horror in every face. Murder is more than a crime to them. A killer is more evil than outsiders can imagine.) And like the “fanatics” to the north, each child is given a Shadow who goes through his or her training with them. A Shadow becomes your extra set of eyes. A Shadow is your partner and confidant. Just as you are bound to your little nation—your fellow warriors—by codes of honor and trust, you are bound to your Shadow too. Except the passion is increased by an order of magnitude. It is so great, I have been told, that in the purest of Freestates a Shadow’s death by any means—age or accident or whatever—is swiftly followed by your own demise. A warrior grows weak and sickens and then is gone, following his Shadow into the oldest adventure of them all…
—excerpt from a traveler’s notebook, available through System-Net
She’s sleeping on the floor, on the deep carpeting, using an arm for a pillow and the other arm lying beside her, her hand carelessly draped over the bandaged thigh. Steward watches her breathing and thinks again about the five months left and how whatever he does has to be done fast so she can enjoy all she can enjoy. That’s what matters. That’s what he has to keep in mind today.
The last thing he does is select a certain World-Net channel and put it up on the wall beside his door. The wall turns the color of slate, and with the delicate pressure of a finger he
starts to write. The pressure is translated into a chalky white line. “GOING ON ERRAND,” he tells her. “WILL CALL SOON. STEWARD.”
He won’t wake her. He moves without sound, the door automatically locking behind him, and he goes downstairs and out on the opposite side of the building. The opposite yard is a little wider. A suggestion of a stream runs down the middle, connecting a series of swimming pools; Steward kneels and sips the warm water and rises again, wiping his mouth dry with the back of his hand.
He runs.
At first it’s a slow, jarring gait. He’s on a path wide enough for two people, its rubbery surface absorbing the foot strikes until he’s loose and extending and breathing naturally, arms working and the sweat beginning. Steward follows the stream toward the east. He listens to Brulé waking around him—people with breakfast voices and lovers at climax and World-Net turned to the local news, the lives of two trillion neighbors distilled into a burst of compressed information. Steward can’t listen to anything long enough to understand meanings. He is past and gone and hearing something new now, and in two strides he’s beyond that too.
The buildings change their shape and look, rising higher and resembling true hills. The yard is wider. The vegetation is groomed and weeded and raked and pruned, leaves polished and blossoms doused with tireless auxins that fool them into lingering for months on end. The air smells cautiously fragrant. Children stand on the balconies, bored enough to watch a lone runner with faintly disapproving expressions. One of the kids—a black-haired boy no older than ten—shouts at Steward, warning him, “You got to stop. Hey! Where you going? Hey, don’t go out there!”
He’s near the edge of the city.
Some places have fringing parks, green and wild. Here the end is a high living wall of interwoven needly brush, gray in its depths and dense throughout. Impassable. He parallels the wall for a little ways, just trotting, then pauses where the brush turns darker, almost black, and while he waits, the tangled mess starts to move. A small tunnel opens at the ground, and Steward kneels and says, “Thanks,” to no one in particular, climbing through, and the tunnel closes behind him with a dry whispery sound.
He’s standing in a field of various vegetables, nothing taller than his waist and no easy path visible. The little stream has vanished. People have vanished. He picks his way along, thinking how he usually comes through the parkland but this is faster. And a narrow path betrays itself, him jogging out into the field—a hundred kinds of vegetables eating the sunlight around him.
The field ends after a kilometer and a steep wooded hillside begins. He climbs a game trail. It’s cool in the shadows, the air moist and lazily still. Sweat soaks clothes and hair and runs into his blinking eyes, burning them, and the quadricep muscles burn in a different way as the legs lift and press down against the slick packed earth.
These are old river bluffs.
Brulé City was built in a wide river valley fringed with high, high loess bluffs laid down at the end of the Ice Age. The river itself was removed in some old civic works project. The drainage through this basin is entirely underground—vast tunnels serving as a kind of urethral system, waste waters and durable blind fish somewhere beneath the vegetable field.
Steward is on top of a high ridge, up in the wind now, and the grass is as tall as elephants and bowing with a dry smooth sound only made by windblown grass. The trail is broad and straight along the ridge-line. Eyes are watching him as he goes—roodeer and wild cattle and flighty wild ponies and long-limbed boars hunkering down and waiting for him to vanish. There are cougars, too, and big tailored jaguars with pelts that change the shape and size of their spots, and there’s at least one cranky grizzly bear in the wooded valleys beyond the ridge. Sometimes Steward comes to hunt the country, or just to camp overnight, and he likes it so long as he can’t see anything of Yellowknife in it.
He’s moving south, pressing against the wind.
Brulé is a series of peculiar ridges, low and laid out with a carpenter’s geology, and the Old Quarter stands on the horizon. He can’t hear the city over the wind, or see people or individual floaters. He thinks of poor Chiffon sleeping alone. He remembers how they slept like unequal spoons on the carpeted floor, his waking unexpectedly and feeling her heat while he lay awake planning what he would do today. He thinks of her personal geology, smiling to himself. He wonders who did the designing. He doesn’t let himself dwell on the five-month limitation, doesn’t let himself get sad or hopeful about anything so remote. It is enough to love and protect her now. It’s enough to have the privilege of her special charms…and he stops and says, “Listen to yourself.” He shakes his head and mutters, “You’re fifteen again, you fool.”
A little trail goes off the main trail, heading west. It passes between two dead trees and down the steep face of the ridge. The loess soil is crumbling where roots don’t tie it down. Steward reaches a ledge just wide enough for him to squat and relax. He looks straight out into the high treetops and spies a pair of lanky tailored apes with green fur and striped faces and bright black eyes. The apes are talking to one another. They use hands and simple words and nods. They’ve seen him, but they seem not to care. He hears them talking on and on, something social and gossipy to their tone, and meanwhile he finds a hidden rope and tosses it over the ledge and breathes once before taking hold, swinging out off the ledge and dropping hand over hand, his nose to the earth and the tangled branches behind him.
The cave is nearly invisible, its door the color and texture of the soil. The door opens with a soft click, knowing him, and he gets a foot on the floor and then the other and looks up at the apes. They’ve quit, talking, staring now. They have smug expressions. They were watching him climb and telling themselves that the man knows nothing about climbing, staring down at him now and looking superior to the world.
Steward hadn’t been in Brulé long, and he didn’t have a crush of clients in those first years. He didn’t know how to acquire them and not risk his anonymity. He didn’t know just what he had to sell. Then a certain local Farmstead heard about him and arranged a meeting.
What’s it about? he asked.
You’re from Yellowknife, right?
Sure.
It’s your kind of trouble. We’ll meet and talk. Okay?
He met them in one of the wild parks. He rode in the back of their big floater, the two burly Farmers talking while the country turned to fields beneath them. They looked like one another, like brothers, except somewhere along the line he learned they weren’t family. Not strictly. Steward had heard stories about the Farmsteads—that the people in some were so inbred that they could donate organs and tissue to one another without any fears of rejection—and the one who wasn’t flying turned around and asked:
So. How does a Freestater wander this far south?
I don’t know. Circumstances? he said. I don’t know.
How about the city? You like Brulé City?
Well enough.
All those people? And not all of them Terran, either.
Steward said nothing.
I couldn’t stand that place, the Farmer claimed.
I’d go crazy, his companion admitted.
You aren’t the only one, buddy. I wouldn’t like it for a minute. I hate even going near it.
Steward sat and watched the landscape change, saying nothing and thinking to himself.
The floater spiraled down and landed beside a field of mature corntrees. The three of them climbed out and squatted and spoke in curiously hushed voices. Imagine yourself leading a party across that field, said the first one. It’s night. No moon. And a hard, hard rain is falling.
A blinding rain, said the other.
You know something about sensors and fooling sensors. Right? You do that sort of thing in Yellowknife, don’t you?
Steward admitted it.
Well, said the second one, we want help.
Your help, said the first one.
What can I do?
The Farmers looked at
one another, something passing between them. The thing is, said the first, we need help making ape marks.
Ape marks?
If someone came and checked it out, we want them to find evidence of wandering apes. You know? These troops can cover a lot of terrain.
A lot, echoed the second one.
Steward looked out at all the tall, heavily built corntrees, and he asked, Who owns the land?
The Farmers said, Someone else.
And what are you going to do?
They glanced at one another again, weighing words.
Suppose you were wronged, said the second Farmer. Suppose you couldn’t get justice from courts hamstrung by favoritism and incompetence. Can you imagine it?
Sure.
You need to take action, said the first Farmer. When you’re wronged, you do.
We’re going to do it, said the second one. It’s not your job, okay? We won’t ask you.
Just get us over and back.
And make them think of roving apes.
Can you?
I can, he admitted.
Will you?
He said, I’ll have to think it over.
They blinked and chewed on their identical lips.
Steward stood and said, Take me back and give me some time.
How much? said the first one.
Some.
It’s going to be moonless tonight, with rain.
I’ll let you know this afternoon. I promise.
They seemed relieved. They talked to one another all the way back to Brulé City. When Steward was on the ground again, the second Farmer said, You should think about this business. We can do you good.
I’ll think and thanks, he said. Thanks.
Maybe we should talk money, said the first Farmer. Want us to talk money?
No. That can wait.
We’re trusting you, he said. You’re from Yellowknife. We’ve heard good, good things about you people. An agreement made is for life, right? For always?
